In addition, the committee wants transactions related to the Washington Free Beacon, a conservative news site funded by GOP-mega-donor Paul Singer. The Beacon first hired Fusion in 2015 to investigate then-candidate Donald Trump, an anathema to many D.C. establishment Republicans.

The Free Beacon says the payments stopped in April 2016. Fusion then sought funds from the Democrats. After the Democratic National Committee announced on June 22, 2016 that Russia had hacked its computer network, Fusion hired Mr. Steele to prove there was a Trump-Putin conspiracy.

The House filings stated, “The committee has a clear investigative interest in scrutinizing Beacon’s public claims regarding its relationship with Fusion GPS.”

The report raises questions about both the timing of Fusion GPS’s “investigation,” into potential ties between President Trump and Putin (none have been found thus far), and the alleged Kremlin-lead DNC hack attack. Was the research firm hired to shift the blame from a DNC leaker or other party to Russia?

The answer to this question posed by TGP maybe be a very emphatic YES.

In fact the entire DNC hack / Russiagate witch-hunt may have less to do with taking down Trump, and more to do with protecting Obama’s vast illegal surveillance of the Trump campaign during the 2016 elections, in favor of Hillary Clinton.

Back in January when the 6th January 2017 ODNI report was published I speculated that the long seven page appendix about RT that was mysteriously attached to it might suggest that the US intelligence community has convinced itself that RT was in some way the intermediary the Russians used to provide the DNC and Podesta emails to Wikileaks.

After all Julian Assange has had a programme on RT and RT – along with many other stations – covered the story of the DNC and Podesta leaks heavily. It is not difficult to see how in the present hysterical atmosphere someone might have put all these facts together and come to some completely erroneous conclusions which are not supported by evidence.

I say the last because as I have pointed out previously, former FBI Director James Comey has in effect admitted that the FBI and therefore presumably Special Counsel Mueller’s investigators actually have no idea how the emails reached Wikileaks.

If this is indeed what is going on then it is legally and ethically highly dubious. However this has been the consistent pattern of the whole Russiagate investigation from the start.

It is now clear that it was used to place members of the Trump campaign under surveillance, and has since morphed into what looks like an increasingly desperate attempt to justify this conduct.

The DNC “hack” (which was never investigated by the FBI), the Trump Dossier (which has never been verified as even remotely true)…are the reasons James Comey took those infamous “notes” as he meet with the newly elected POTUS Trump in January 2017.

Obama’s very illegal surveillance of Trump and his staffers, with Comey’s FBI assisting in such surveillance, has now morphed into a Mueller special counsel that is searching for a way to justify Obama spying on the entire Trump campaign in the first place.

Proving Trump somehow colluded with Russia, while proving Russia somehow hacked the DNC servers, will provide all the cover the DC swamp needs to protect their puppet Obama, who was spying on Trump and his staff during the 2016 election, in order to make sure Hillary Clinton would end up in the White House.